Diana Deutsch

Research Interests

Professor Diana Deutsch is one of the most prominent researchers on the psychology of music. She is internationally known for the illusions of sound and music perception that she has discovered. She also explores ways in which we hold musical information in memory, and in which we relate the sounds of music and speech to each other. Much of her current research focuses on the question of absolute pitch - why some people possess it, and why it is so rare.

Deutsch has over 150 written publications, which include the book The Psychology of Music, now in its third edition, and three articles in Scientific American. She has also published two compact discs that feature her illusions: these are Musical Illusions and Paradoxes, and Phantom Words, and Other Curiosities.

Deutsch has been elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Acoustical Society of America, the Audio Engineering Society, the Society of Experimental Psychologists, the American Psychological Society, and the American Psychological Association. She has served as Governor of the Audio Engineering Society, as Chair of the Section on Psychology of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, as President of Division 10 of the American Psychological Association, and as Chair of the Society of Experimental Psychologists. She is Founding Editor of the journal Music Perception, and served as Founding President of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition. Among her many awards, Deutsch has received the Rudolf Arnheim Award for Outstanding Achievement in Psychology and the Arts by the American Psychological Association, the Gustav Theodore Fechner Award by the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics.

Deutsch, D., Dooley, K., Henthorn, T. and Head, B. Absolute pitch among students in an American music conservatory: Association with tone language fluency. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2009, 125, 2398-2403.